On Long Drives and Finding White Space
Since moving up here, I’ve gotten into driving. I’ve never been the driver – Dan is the one who drives us to holiday destinations and restaurants, while I’ve always kept my journeys to an hour max. Not that I’m a nervous driver, we’ve just always lived in places where everything I need is on the doorstep, or where getting the train is just easier. But that is most certainly not the case anymore.As a new Welsh friend said to me, if you want to live in North Wales you have to accept that you need to drive a lot - not least because the nearest supermarket is 25 miles away. Up here the mountains are still king; humanity has yet to find a way to bend them to our will, so the roads make their long and arduous way respectfully around them, adding half hours onto every journey.
From our town, there are three main artery roads - one goes east to England, one west along the coast, and one north deeper into the National Park. Each one navigates the flat ground either where the sea has receded or in valleys between soaring peaks through forests and along river beds. The little local roads feed into them like tributaries, single track trails that strike upward to a single village or farm.I’ve also still not got used to the fact that we are just generally really far away from places. Our nearest city (and, more importantly, M&S), Aberystwyth, is over an hour’s drive away. The nearest motorway an hour and a half. Hell, just getting out of the National Park will take you 40 minutes. And the train, a slow stopping service comprised of two coaches, will take you to Birmingham in 3 hours, and no further.So I hope this paints the picture that if I want to go anywhere now, I have to drive. And drive for a long time. At first I was troubled by this – not used to driving and busy being busy, it felt like a waste of time and really just something I didn’t really want to do. But, I’ve come to terms with it as something integral to my life and existence, and, more than that, I’ve really embraced the white space it’s bringing to my life.
I’ve spoken before about how I struggle to devote time to anything that isn’t work, isn’t doing, but of course, when you’re driving there isn’t much you can do. There’s no writing, no scrolling, no checking emails. All you can do is think and listen. Driving has become the way that I allow myself to stop and think, and I’ve grown to love, rather than resent, these hours.Perhaps a little sub-consciously, I’ve started building them into my routine more and more. Nowadays, if I put a journey into Google Maps and it returns a 3 hour journey time, I get a little frisson inside, that guilty pleasure feeling that I’ll have all that time to myself. I try to get a good drive in at least once a week, whether to the shops, to a workshop or just around this beautiful place that we live.I use driving as a way to catch up on podcasts. I love podcasts, and used to listen to them at work to get me through the day, but now I struggle to find time for them. The bulk of what I do now is writing and thinking, and for those things I need to be in total silence, so podcast listening doesn’t slot into my life in quite the same way now. I’ve realised that when I get a hankering for a drive it comes at a point where my podcast app is taking up a lot of my storage.
Another joy has been learning about this new landscape we’re living in, getting to know the area and how to navigate it. Learning which roads lead where, which town is in relation to that one and spotting waterfalls from a distance to put on the mental list of places to go walking. Driving around Snowdonia has helped me feel attached and settled in this place, to know it like I know my home and to feel more and more like a local. And of course, to actually get to see some of it, to get out and walk in it and watch the colours changing through the seasons. My new-found openness towards driving also has me discovering new places further afield – this weekend I visited West Yorkshire by road, something I would never have done before, and I’m going almost the entire length of Wales next week.And, of course, driving gives you time alone with your thoughts. Sometimes during a podcast episode I’ll drift off into daydreams, or occasionally I’ll put on a classical radio station so as not to be consumed by the words of others. You can get some good thinking done in the car because it’s not constrained by you writing notes, or picking up your phone or opening another tab. You can’t interrupt yourself; the thoughts and ideas just flow from one to the other. Even if you can’t remember every idea, it can only be a good thing for your creativity to let your brain freewheel for a bit, to let it out into the fields to run around and stretch its legs. The good ideas will always come back.
Now you probably don’t need to spend as much time driving in your life as I do. Maybe you don’t ever need to drive. Perhaps you’re thinking you can do all these things on public transport and what am I banging on about. But I think there’s something about the solitude of a car journey that is crucial to its value as white space – there’s no worrying about someone sitting next you, or hearing the coughs, sneezes and conversations of others. There is none of the energy of the crowd or of individuals encroaching on you. Being in the car is as alone and distraction-free as you’re ever likely to be, and I for one think there’s magic in that.
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